historyofjapan
patreon
Episode 424 - The City on the Edge of Forever, Part 3
🕑 Added 2022-02-04 17:09:53 +0000 UTCOne of the subjects I always struggle with in episodes like this is how direct to be about the realities of persecution. On the one hand, I am very uncomfortable trying to play down the violence of moments like this; it's not doing anyone a service to pretend this was not a horrendously destructive moment in history. On the other, the goal is not to traumatize people with graphic depictions of executions, or to desensitize people. Striking that balance is always hard, and frankly I'm never sure if I got it right. I have a weird relationship to that kind of material given that my planned dissertation topic was focused on war crimes, so perhaps I'm more desensitized than most.
On the other hand, this was a fascinating episode to write and research because of the figure of Hideyoshi. Part of what makes him interesting is that we have so little of his 'internal dialogue', so to speak. That's what makes it so easy to read him either as a power-mad lunatic or a calculating political genius; we have only the records of his actions but not a lot of clarity regarding what motivated him. The persecutions are a classic example; we can speculate based on the behavior of the Jesuits, and frankly I think those speculations are about as well supported as it is possible to get in this context, but anything approaching certainty is elusive at best. And I love that kind of historical detective work.
So, a complex episode on the whole. Next week we're going to get into the origins of the Tokugawa persecutions and the end of Nagasaki's Christian period, and that's going to be a fascinating--but difficult--conversation too.
